FOUR FACES OF SIVA
Photograph by Mrs. Emma L. Rose
FINELY CARVED FIGURES OF INFINITE NUMBER AND VARIETY ADORN THE RUINS
OF ANGKOR
legend, were as deeply carpeted with use
less verdure as the hidden cities of the
north.
Pnompenh, the capital of the Kingdom
of Cambodia (western portion of the Indo
Chinese Peninsula), was a village of nipa
thatch and bamboo, a comic-opera me
tropolis, where a despot ruled in fear of
his life over a semisavage, if not com
pletely savage, people.
Saigon, the present capital of French
enterprise in the East, was just rising
from the marshes south of Annam. What
might lie hidden in the masses of foliage
to the north no one knew. The world had
heard, but had forgotten, the tales of Por
tuguese missionaries of the seventeenth
century, that marvelous cities with leap-
ing towers stood dead among the trees
of the Tonle Sap. Wherever there is
unexplored territory one is certain to hear
of such cities, and the world had grown
too wise and too skeptical to pay attention
to such nonsense.
True, there had been a Chinese traveler,
Tcheou-Ta-Quan by name, who had writ
ten what purported to be a chronicle of
his service as ambassador to some king
dom in the Mekong Valley. It was con
ceded that the writer might actually have
had some such service, but it was obvious
that in his description of the marvels he
had found in his dubious kingdom he was
merely a pleasant liar.
If the Cambodians were to be consid
ered as the heritors of these theoretical
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